Logo Lounge, for the past nine years, has posted annual logo design trend reportsand they have just released the 2011 logo design trends report. I would love to hear your thoughts on the showcased trends.

Do these identity / branding trends effect you or your process? Do you agree with these suggestions? Have you noticed any other trends?

Disclaimer

On this topic of trends, one should not follow trends for the sake of following them. As Bill Gardner points out:

Every year, it’s worth noting that this is a report on trends, not a recipe book of styles. It is also not a finite list: There are other valid trends out there that are not mentioned here.

The report should serve you as an ongoing view of where logo design is headed. The word “trends” in itself can have a very negative cast, but in truth, trends aren’t bad. They reveal our growth. It’s our take on them that allows us to move even further forward.

There are many ways to design sign-up and log-in forms. Most designers are familiar with the conventional ways. But understanding and applying a few innovative techniques could make your forms simpler and more efficient to fill out. In this article, we’d like to present a couple of new ideas that might be useful for your next designs. Please notice that before using these techniques, you should make sure that they make sense in the context in which you are going to use them. We’d love to hear about your case-studies and usability tests that affirm or dismiss the suggestions proposed below.

Simplifying Sign-Ups

The purpose of every sign-up form is for users to complete it successfully and send it in. However, if the form is long and complicated, then the user’s excitement for your website could turn to displeasure. Here are a few innovative techniques that will make your forms faster and easier to fill out.

Ask for a User Name After The User Has Signed Up

Sign-up forms typically ask users to create a name that is unique to the website. However, coming up with a unique user name that’s not taken could take trial and error and, thus, time. Instead of hassling people for a user name when they sign up, you might want to consider asking afterwards. This way, you won’t lose sign-ups from frustrated users, and you’ll prevent users from creating random and forgettable names just to satisfy the form’s requirements.

Need a cool hover effect for something on your site? Look no further! We’ve created several custom examples that you can view live for inspiration.

If you like the effect, steal it! We’ve got the CSS ready and waiting for you to copy.

Bring Your Boring Site to Life

Hover effects can make your site feel much more dynamic and alive. It used to be the case that JavaScript was required to do anything really interesting with a hover effect but these days CSS3 is capable of doing a ton of really cool stuff if you’re creating enough.

The effects we’ll be using today all use code that is supported by modern browsers, meaning of course Mozilla and Webkit for the most part. IE support is spotty at best across various versions so be sure to test thoroughly in your own implementation. Fancy hover effects are one of those things that you can usually degrade fairly gracefully so that older browsers still see some change.

With the arrival of IE9, Microsoft has signalled its intent to work more with standards-based technologies. With IE still the single most popular browser and in many ways the browser for the uninitiated, this is hopefully the long awaited start of us Web craftsmen embracing the idea of using CSS3 as freely as we do CSS 2.1. However, with IE9 not being supported on versions of Windows before Vista and a lot of businesses still running XP and reluctant (or unable) to upgrade, it might take a while until a vast majority of our users will see the new technologies put to practice.

While plenty of people out there are using CSS3, many aren’t so keen or don’t know where to start. This article will first look at the ideas behind CSS3, and then consider some good working practices for older browsers and some new common issues.

A Helpful Analogy

The best analogy to explain CSS3 that I’ve heard relates to the world of film. Filmmakers can’t guarantee what platform their viewers will see their films on. Some will watch them at the cinema, some will watch them at home, and some will watch them on portable devices. Even among these few viewing options, there is still a massive potential for differences: IMAX, DVD, Blu-ray, surround sound — somebody may even opt for VHS!

So, does that mean you shouldn’t take advantage of all the great stuff that Blu-ray allows with sound and video just because someone somewhere will not watch the film on a Blu-ray player? Of course not. You make the experience as good as you can make it, and then people will get an experience that is suitable to what they’re viewing the movie on. Continue reading →

Good navigation is the main cornerstone of an effective website. In practice, however, it’s often a tough challenge to come up with a meaningful, unambiguous way to organize, arrange, and display content to users; and it’s often not much easier to find a visually interesting solution either. The wide adaption of JavaScript libraries like jQuery is making it increasingly easy to add various kinds of sleek animations to navigation design. For instance, many recent promo websites are essentially single page websites with an array of animation effects used to make navigation a smoother and richer user experience.

Parallax and Scrolling

Parallax is an animation effect that allows layers to move in response to a particular viewpoint. The effect is used to add a three-dimensional depth illusion to the design and make interaction more responsive and interesting. Recently, this technique has been frequently used to animate background images, as in the famous Nike Better World site.

As web design and design in general have evolved, rules have been established to ensure consistent and usable designs.

Some of these rules were created simply because website creators abused certain principles without regard for their users. But these rules are not enforced by anyone and should be broken when necessary, especially when breaking them would lead to a stunning design. In this article, we present 10 rules that you can break if it suits your design needs.

Rule #1: Do Not Display the Horizontal Scroll Bar

A significant number of mice don’t have a horizontal mouse wheel. This makes it awkward to scroll left or right when a web page’s content extends past the sides of the browser. It can be annoying to have to bring the mouse cursor down to the bottom of the window and drag the scroll bar over just to see a word or two that lies beyond the viewable area of the page. That said, here are some well-designed sites that put the scroll bar to work in effective ways. Continue reading →

When you think of most websites, purple is the color you may think of the least. Some designers have embraced this and made their sites stand out from the rest. In this post I will share with you 17 websites that make use of the color purple.

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

Favicon

A favicon brands the tab or window in which your website is open in the user’s browser. It is also saved with the bookmark so that users can easily identify pages from your website. Some browsers pick up the favicon if you save it in your root directory as favicon.ico, but to be sure it’s picked up all the time, include the following in your head.

Let’s pull it all together with some pragmatic ways to get your typeface choice made. You might want to try these tips, which many designers use to their advantage in one way or another. Be the beneficiary of their wisdom and experience.

1. Plan Your Hierarchy

First, make sure you have a good grasp of the content and typographic hierarchy your design job will dictate. You may realize, after a thorough analysis, you need five fonts (not typefaces) to cover your various heading, sub-headings and call-outs. Can your typeface provide enough variation with bolds, italics and small caps? Or do you need two typefaces to create more distinction in the hierarchy? Three? Use a mind-mapping tool or make a traditional outline to see as much as you can before you start choosing typefaces. Consider this example of a bad and a good hierarchy using the same text. Notice the role white space plays in the hierarchy, too. Use as many levels as you need as long as there is distinction and clear purpose in your choices.